Pirate Bay traffic doubles over three years

It's probably the most censored site on the Internet, blocked by national firewalls all over the world, but more people use it every day.

It helps that there's so much legit material on TPB, including my own freely distributable works; the entertainment industry made folk heroes out of them, and then martyrs -- when they had the site's founders arrested. They've been the subject of documentaries and remain the gold standard for technical robustness in the face of adversity.

These numbers reveal that the torrent site is still doing quite well, but that doesn’t mean that the blockades are not working. After all, the additional traffic could simply come from other countries.

A better indication for the effectiveness of the blockades are the number of visitors that access the site through proxies. The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that roughly 9% of all visitors use proxies. This percentage doesn’t include sites that cache pages.

In other words, a significant percentage of users who don’t have direct access to the site are bypassing court-ordered blockades though proxies.